Guild of DungeoneeringReview

With a friendly and accessible approach to card battling and charming hand-drawn art reminiscent of a day dreaming junior high schooler’s sketchbook, Guild of Dungeoneering manages to be endearing and cute in a way most strategic turn-based dungeon crawlers aren’t. Its biggest limitation is a short and punchy style of gameplay that ultimately puts a cap on the complexity and depth of its tactics just as things start to get good.

Exit Theatre Mode

A humorous take on turn-based dungeon crawling puts you not in the role of a single, glory-seeking hero, but a rejected thrillseeker-turned-guild master looking to steal some glory from those who doubted you. Your goal of rounding up a ragtag team of disposable adventurers and sending them out in search of loot adds some light-hearted justification for the harsh amounts of permadeath in store, making the fact that your guild’s cemetery will largely outweigh the trophy room darkly comic. This setup establishes a playful tone early on, though all the tongue-in-cheek bard’s tunes were a bit overly cutesy for my tastes.

What grabbed me instead was my role in building the actual dungeons as I played them. Each quest starts your chosen hero out on a single tile, with some parts of the level already mapped out in small patches. Figuring out the proper way to coax my hero through the dungeon by connecting the rooms on the board was a neat puzzle system in itself. With a limited number of tiles to play per turn and just three types (represented by loot, land, and enemy cards), comes a surprising amount of strategic depth – when it wasn’t bogged down by an unbalanced sense of unpredictability.

Some of the unpredictability is a good thing, such as how different quest types change up your goal so you’re not always doing the same thing with the same tiles. On one adventure you might need to get your hero from one side of the dungeon to the other in a limited number of moves, and in another you might need to grind against lower-level enemies until your hero is strong enough to take on the dungeon’s overlord.

The dungeon-building in some quests demands careful decision making and even risk taking, since you never know what the next hand of tiles holds. This offers a welcome challenge that balances your freedom as a sort-of dungeon master while still limiting your power. At times, though, the nature of the randomized card draws was too constricting, which – combined with the more specific quest goals and the fact that it’s not immediately clear what determines a hero’s pathfinding – made for the occasionally frustrating and seemingly impossible scenario. There were times when I’d get to the end of a dungeon, only to be thrown off by a bad hand and end up building out useless rooms just to dispose of the cards, while my hero was left to meander meaninglessly. That’s not to say I didn’t make a few bad choices, but too often it felt like those were the only choices available to make. This imbalanced reliance on random chance ruined the flow of a system that was otherwise creative and enjoyable, when circumstances allowed it. Perhaps a few new card types could’ve changed things up.

Combat is also done via an extremely standard but sometimes boringly simplistic card game, where enemies play a card and you play one to counter from a randomly drawn hand. Cards never do much more than attack, block, or some combination of the two, with the occasional special effect. It’s the kind of quick and undemanding fun you see in mobile games, but it did grow on me thanks to the engaging deck-building system.

Guild of Dungeoneering

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As you play, you unlock all kinds of armor, helmets, weapons, and off-hand objects associated with one or more cards. After you defeat enemies and find treasure, you get to pick from one of three (sometimes more) pieces of gear, so you’re constantly building up and adjusting a special deck of cards to your liking. The different combinations of gear add a wealth of creative and strategic freedom to an otherwise-basic card game. Countering a move from an enemy with a card that I just picked up in my last turn was always satisfying, as I knew I’d made a good choice.

Different, unlockable classes of heroes get their own unique starting decks and perks that set them apart, but also aren’t limited to what gear they can use, so there’s a diverse set of play styles to choose from and even customize as you go. One of the starting brawler classes like the Bruiser, for instance, has a really useful trait called Spikey that does one damage to enemies every time you fully block an attack, while the higher-tiered Apprentice class starts with several magic and healing cards. I never felt short of options when I wanted to approach a particularly tough dungeon in a new way.

The most disappointing part was not getting to use these decks for very long. Quick bursts of gameplay might be Guild of Dungeoneering’s main idea, and starting from square one (literally) is indeed part of the fun, but there were times when I had a really good deck going and wanted to keep using it, only to have it yanked away at the conclusion of a quest. Some kind of endless mode that would let me continue on with the deck I’d built would’ve been a nice way to expand the fun and make up for the fact that quests aren’t replayable.

Similarly disappointing is the interface, which is as flat and devoid of feedback (either visual or audio) as actual paper. It never hindered my understanding of what was happening, since the card battles are extremely straightforward, but the lack of visual response to my actions made everything feel bland. Just because Guild of Dungeoneering presents itself like a hybrid card/board game gone digital doesn’t mean it should constrain itself to the visual limitations of an actual tabletop experience.

This flatness carries over to the guild itself. For a game that revolves around a guild, the actual guild screen doesn’t have much in the way of interaction. There’s a cemetery where you can view gravestones of your fallen heroes and see how many runs they completed, which doesn’t matter since characters don’t progress with experience or come with unique abilities beyond their class, and are thus completely forgettable underlings. (I would’ve preferred to see gravestones of my precious custom decks.) There’s a trophy room, which lets you see how many attempts it took you to beat a boss. But you can’t view anything else, like the different starting decks of various classes, or a list of gear you’ve unlocked all in one place, or even a database of enemies you’ve encountered thus far. All you get when you click on surviving dungeoneers is a silly little joke or witticism.

The Verdict

Guild of Dungeoneering is a simple but fun dungeon-crawling and card-battling game that gradually grew on me the more I played. It manages to maintain interest with randomized dungeons that usually work out well, but could really benefit from some balance tweaks and a way to put more fully developed decks to the test.